How to convert to black and white

In the old days, you chose whether you were shooting color or black and white bythe film that you chose to put in your camera.These days of course working digitally, we all shoot in color all the time,and if we want to work in black and white, we have to go through ablack-and-white conversion.If you're new to black and white, if you don't understand why you would everwant to work in black and white when you have all this color, take a look at myFoundations of Photography: Black and White course.It will walk you through the aesthetics of black and white, help you understandthe power of black and white, show you how to visualize and shoot in black andwhite, and then work you through black- and-white conversion using Photoshop.

To get a black-and-white image out of your digital camera, you have to takethe color image and convert it to black and white. And obviously we are notusing Photoshop here. Fortunately, Capture NX has a couple of black-and-whiteconversion options.The first one is what I actually would not recommend, and we've seen already.That is to use a saturation edit to drain all the color out of your image.So I am going to go up here to the Color > Saturation and pull all thesaturation out. Sure enough, I have a black-and-white image here.The thing is, I have no control over the black-and-white conversion.

Here's the weird thing about black and white.There is no objective shade of gray that corresponds to this particular shade ofblue or to this shade of red or to these light yellowish tones, yellow-reddish-whitish tones in here.The power of black and white comes from the fact that I can choose to tone aparticular color a particular shade of gray, and that choice gives me a lot ofcreative power. By simply turning on the desaturation, I've got just the slightshade of gray in the sky and this dark shade of gray over here on the red.And that may not be what I had visualized or what I would like,so I am going to get rid of that.

There is a better way of doing black- and-white conversion in Capture NX,and that's to go up here to the Filter menu and choose Black and White Conversion.When I do that, I get a Black and White Conversion edit in my Edit List.It's got a few sliders here.First of all, it's got this Brightness and Contrast sliders, the same ones thatkeep popping up in other places in the program. And like in those other places,you don't want to use these.They are blunt instruments that don't do you much good.The real power in this edit comes from the Filter Hue slider and the ColorFilter Strength slider.

Again, going back to those old days of yesteryear when used a film camera andput black-and-white film in it, you very often would put a colored filter overyour lens to try to get certain colors toned to particular shades of gray.That's what Filter Hue is simulating here;it's simulating a virtual colored filter over your lens.Take a look right in here at what should be a blue sky and what should be thered tile on the roof of this building. Just keep your eyes on that as I drag theFilter Hue slider around, and notice how much they change.Again, this is the power of good black- and-white conversion is that I can chooseto tone these shades in different shades of gray and I get very different imagesin the process, different resulting images in the process.

Below the Filter Hue slider, I have a Color Filter Strength slider.That's basically simulating the thickness of the virtual filter, how muchfiltering is going on.I am going to crank it all the way up, and now look what happens as I drag this around.We see a much more pronounced effect.So I have got a broad range of different resulting grayscale images that I canget from this one color shot.Now what I'm thinking is I would like to play up the contrast here in the sky.I would like to have a really dark skybehind those white clouds.So I'm going to put my filter right about here. And I like a couple things about this.

I am just jogging it back and forth a little bit because I like what's alsohappening on the roof the building. I like the lighter tiles, the darker sky,and now I've got some nice contrast in here.Sometimes you will come at a black- and-white conversion knowing the tonalrelationships that you want.You might have a very clear idea that this thing is going to be light, thatthing is going to be dark. At other times you'll do what I did here maybe andjust do a little digging, a little exploring and see what looks good.After you've got your black-and-white conversion done though, you will mostlikely go back and selectively tone different parts of the image. And as wehave seen, we have got a lot of different ways of making selective edits in Capture NX.

In the next movie, we will take a look at further refining this image withsome selective edits.

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Released

2/23/2012

In this course, photographer and teacher Ben Long shows how to use the Nikon Capture NX2 photo-editing software to perform nondestructive sharpening, white balancing, tonal and color corrections, and more. The course covers how to set preferences and define an efficient postproduction workflow, how to perform and automate a wide variety of image edits, how to work with RAW files, and how to get the best results when printing.